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Hire values first, skills last
Most people read a resume to judge skills. But a person with real abilities can change what their skills are, and skills go out of date. Programmers may no longer be the most important people in a world where something new keeps coming along.
That ordering is why Bridgewater once hired a door-to-door Bible salesman to sell its research. He didn't know much about research or finance. He was curious, and the questions that mattered were what his values were, what he could do, and what kind of relationship they would have in pursuing a dream.
Most of the value is in that discovery, not in memorized rules. It is also what talent identification means, and talent is worth more than money. Elon Musk had no money when people found him, and the people who made money did it by investing in him: human capital before financial capital.
Why do interviews miss real ability?
Psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter reviewed decades of hiring research in a 1998 paper. They found that unstructured conversations predicted job performance much less well than work samples and structured interviews, where every candidate answers the same questions. The finding suggests that gut impressions of a person carry less information than a consistent look at what they have actually done.
How do startups change what they make?
Many well-known companies began as something else. Instagram started as a check-in app called Burbn, and Slack grew out of an internal chat tool built by a team making an online game. Because the product often changes, early investors and founders frequently put weight on the people building it.
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